The present invention relates to a ballistic protection of flexible wires, cables, conduits and the like, hereinafter referred to as conduits for brevity sake.
More particularly, the invention provides armor tubes and swivel joints which can be assembled axially in an alternate array to armor a flexible conduit such as for example a fluid power hose.
Vehicles used on land, sea or in the air (protected platforms) often include exposed flexible conduits, for example lines carrying hydraulic, pneumatic or electrical power, gases, fluids, i.e. water or cooling fluids. Many such lines are essential for the functioning of the vehicle, and if damaged could place the vehicle or at least its current mission into jeopardy. Armored vehicles, military and even some types of civilian vehicles thus require that such conduits, if not protected by the armor enclosing the rest of the vehicle, be provided with their own protection.
Most armor is rigid, and thus cannot be used to surround a conduit that must flex, as for example conduits connected to the folding landing gear of an aircraft.
The provided armor is designed to protect against a specified threat level, and is suited to the type, power, speed and weight of the vehicle to be protected. Obviously the type of armor found on tanks and battleships cannot be carried by light road vehicles or small boats; conversely light vehicles cannot be expected to survive being hit by an anti-tank missile. The selected weight of armor for vehicles is always a compromise between a higher level of protection causing reduced vehicle mobility, range and speed and a lower level of protection, together with mobility close to that of an unarmored vehicle.
The weight of armor is detrimental to the speed, maneuverability, maintenance costs, fuel consumption and range of motorized vehicles.
Examples of armor systems intended to provide adequate protection without excessive weight are found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,529,640, 4,836,084 and 4,868,040.
Flexible conduits projecting beyond the normal envelope of the vehicle armor have in the past been protected by extensions to such rigid armor. Such extensions add considerable weight and cost, and are not easily repaired if damaged.
A preliminary search of prior-art solutions for flexible conduit armor surprisingly revealed only a single U.S. Pat. No. 4,093,004 to Kile et al. They propose the use of multiple layers of cross-lapped oriented polyolefin material. Polyolefin homopolymers include a range of plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene, ethylene-vinyl acetate, and others. Some polyolefins have excellent flexibility and can be formulated to provide several hundred percent elongation before break, but as these materials have only moderate resistance to being severed by a sharp object such as a shell fragment or armor piercing (AP) bullets, so thick-wall armor is needed to provide reasonable protection, which results in limited flexibility for the conduit to be protected.
Reinforced hydraulic hose made according to SAE standards, for example the multi-layer 100R9 hose, contain one or more layer of wire or fiber braid, and would provide some ballistic protection. However such hoses are optimized to resist internal pressure and are unreliable or limited in resistance to penetration from external ammunition or fragments, especially AP threats.
It is therefore one of the objects of the present invention to obviate the disadvantages of prior art flexible conduit armor and to provide a system which protects the conduit against small-arms fire, splinters, fragments, etc., and yet retains good flexibility of the protected conduit.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide such light weight protection without a substantial weight penalty degrading vehicle performance.
The present invention achieves the above objects by providing an armor system for ballistic protection of a flexible conduit, said system comprising a plurality of protective tubular elements in axial alternating array with double-socket joint elements, the outer peripheral ends of said tubular elements being provided with a convex curvature complementary to a concave curvature provided along the inner peripheral ends of said double-socket joint element, a protective tubular element being inserted in each end of said double-socket joint elements, said curved peripheral end allowing any tubular element connected to a double-socket element to tilt freely relative thereto.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention there is provided an armor system for ballistic protection of a flexible conduit wherein each tubular element connected to said double-socket element may tilt freely to any angle, i.e. to 25 degrees relative to the axis of said double-socket joint element (see FIG. 2).
In a most preferred embodiment of the present invention there is provided an armor system for ballistic protection of a flexible conduit, wherein said tubular elements comprise at least three layers, said layers being preferably an outer layer being made of a hard, tough grade of steel, a middle layer comprising high strength fibers held in a polymeric binder, and an inner layer comprising a ductile metal tube.
Yet further embodiments of the invention will be described hereinafter.
In contradistinction to the flexible conduit armor disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,093,004 to Kile et al., the present invention can be executed to practically any degree of required flexibility simply by using short rigid tubes and a correspondingly larger number of double-socket elements.
Furthermore, as there is no requirement for flexibility in the protective tubular elements, liberal use of metals and ceramics is possible to provide any desired degree of protection level required.
The fact that the armor of the present invention comprises an axial assembly of individual protective elements, brings further advantages in production and assembly, as well as the convenient options of using a combination of tubular elements of different lengths. For example, a conduit may be required to flex over its middle part but need not flex along the length of its first and last parts. The use of different length tubular elements will meet such requirement. Thus, variable shapes of tube geometry can be protected by the currently invented system.
Maintenance and repair are also greatly facilitated by the use of parts which can be replaced if damaged without there being a need to replace the whole armor system. Armored vehicles are used in situations where ballistic damage can be expected, and while a shell fragment damaging armor of the type described by Kile et al. will necessitate the replacement of the complete armor assembly, in the system of present invention it is only necessary to replace the damaged component or components.
The invention will now be described in connection with certain preferred embodiments with reference to the following illustrative figures so that it may be more fully understood.
With specific reference now to the figures in detail, it is stressed that the particulars shown are by way of example and for purposes of illustrative discussion of the preferred embodiments of the present invention only and are presented in the cause of providing what is believed to be the most useful and readily understood description of the principles and conceptual aspects of the invention. In this regard, no attempt is made to show structural details of the invention in more detail than is necessary for a fundamental understanding of the invention, the description taken with the drawings making apparent to those skilled in the art how the several forms of the invention may be embodied in practice.